How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy

Charles M Schulz drew his beloved Peanuts strip for 50 years until his announcement on 14 December 1999 that ill health was forcing him to retire. In History looks at how an unassuming cartoonist built a billion-dollar empire out of the lives of a group of children, a dog and a bird.

Charles M Schulz’s timeless creation Charlie Brown may have been as popular as any character in all of literature, but the cartoonist was modest about the scope of his miniature parables. In a 1977 BBC interview, he said: “I’m talking only about the minor everyday problems in life. Leo Tolstoy dealt with the major problems of the world. I’m only dealing with why we all have the feeling that people don’t like us.”  

This did not mean that he felt as if he was dealing with trivial matters. He said: “I’m always very much offended when someone asks me, ‘Do I ever do satire on the social condition?’ Well, I do it almost every day. And they say, ‘Well, do you ever do political things?’ I say, ‘I do things which are more important than politics. I’m dealing with love and hate and mistrust and fear and insecurity.'”  

While Charlie Brown may have been the eternal failure, the universal feelings that Schulz channelled helped make Peanuts a global success. Born in 1922, Schulz drew every single Peanuts strip himself from 1950 until his death in February 2000. It was so popular that Nasa named two of the modules in its May 1969 Apollo 10 lunar mission after Charlie Brown and Snoopy. The strip was syndicated in more than 2,600 newspapers worldwide, and inspired films, music and countless items of merchandise. 

Part of its success, according to the writer Umberto Eco, was that it worked on different levels. He wrote: “Peanuts charms both sophisticated adults and children with equal intensity, as if each reader found there something for himself, and it is always the same thing, to be enjoyed in two different keys. Peanuts is thus a little human comedy for the innocent reader and for the sophisticated.” 

Schulz’s initial reason for focusing on children in the strip was strictly commercial. In 1990, he told the BBC: “I always hate to say it, but I drew little kids because this is what sold. I wanted to draw something, I didn’t know what it was, but it just seemed as if whenever I drew children, these were the cartoons that editors seemed to like the best. And so, back in 1950, I mailed a batch of cartoons to New York City, to United Features Syndicate, and they said they liked them, and so ever since I’ve been drawing little kids.”